Those two will provide some comfort to Paulson amid a sharp drop-off in gold prices.

WSJ reported earlier this month that through the first three months of the year, Paulson’s big Advantage funds had been positive. The Advantage fund was up 2.9% for the year off a 5.6% gain in March, and the Advantage Plus fund was up 3.6% for the year including a 7.6% gain last month.

Paulson had first invested in Life back in the second quarter of 2011, buying about 7.5 million shares, according to filings. He trimmed the position slightly in late 2011 but continued to hold a large stake and then boosted the position in the third quarter last year. Paulson & Co. spent somewhere around $660 million on the position in total, according to the person familiar with the matter. It would be worth $1.06 billion in the Thermo Fisher deal.

Paulson, who often makes investments in firms engaged in deals, a type of investing sometimes known as arbitrage, also built a big position in Sprint in the final quarter of 2012. That investment came after the deal Sprint had reached with Softbank.

Sprint shares rose 14% to $7.09 on Monday, meaning Paulson’s investment is worth nearly $907 million now, up from $794 million on Friday.

A Paulson spokeswoman said “We think Dish has made a compelling offer and we will be watching closely how things transpire.”

Paulson & Co. also has built positions in the other telecom companies involved in the latest merry-go-round of deal talks. He has a stake in MetroPCS, which last week got a sweetened offer from Deutsche Telekom, and in Clearwire, which has signed an agreement with Sprint but has offers from Dish and Verizon as well. As of the end of the year, Paulson had reported a stake in Leap Wireless, which has been the subject of much speculation about whether one of the telecom giants will scoop it up.

Those three all dropped Monday, with MetroPCS closing down 3.7%, Clearwire down 3.1% and Leap off 2.3%.

Of course, his biggest bet doesn’t have anything to do with deals, but with gold.

Paulson had built large stakes in a gold ETF and in several gold miners and was one of the biggest investors in the precious metal. Those investments all got rocked in a sell-off Monday with the ETF, the SPDR Gold Trust, slumping 8.7%. The price of gold itself had fallen the most over two sessions in dollar terms since gold futures began trading in the U.S. in 1974.

John Reade, a partner and gold strategist at Paulson & Co., said in a statement that the recent declines in gold haven’t changed the firm’s long-term thesis. While gold prices are off their peak, they are still up “considerably from our cost,” he added.

“While gold can be volatile in the short term, and is going through one of its periodic adjustments, we believe the long term trend of increasing demand for gold in lieu of paper is intact,” Reade said. “It is this expectation of global paper currency debasement which makes gold an attractive long-term investment.”

But on Monday, in Paulson’s case, the cliche rings true: All that glitters is not gold.